Apple has ordered a gargantuan 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon – the recent EMC acquisition – to support its iTunes video service, according to report citing an "inside source".
According to to StorageNewsletter.com, Apple is "probably" the largest of Isilon's 1,500 customers as of the end of December. That may be an …

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Aesthetics?

Yeah, but what does all that storage **look** like?

I suppose to meet Apple's standards, all of the arrays will need to be encased in glossy Pearl White or Piano Black housings, with chrome or brushed-aluminium trim, talk to the outside world through proprietary Apple cable connectors, have industrial-strength MagSafe power cords, and be managed via an iTunes-approved, Safari-based GUI app...

It'll be a while

Not dogs

In any case, this is exactly as the Seagate CEO predicted (and got laughed at by anaLysts pretending to have a clue). The growth in portable media like iDevices will drive growth in BIG storage BIG way.

Linnaeus answered that for you.

After the Felidae --- there's still a lot to go, but I doubt "flat-headed cat", "domestic cat" and "chinese mountain cat" will be used --- you go up the evolutionary tree to go to the Feliformae... Hyena's, Mongooses, and the like.

You see they've already been mixing the Pantheridae and Felinae freely, there's ocelots, margays, caracals, servals and clouded leopards etc still to go. Feliformae gives us binturongs, liksangs, civets, genets, ... . From there it's a small mental (but larger evolutionary) jump to the Mustelids --- the weasel family which I think is appropriate: small expensive sneaky critters that punch above their weight.

Too easy ...

Well...

Well I've 24 gazumbabytes of storage in a shed and my brothers all the Star Wars figures, more than George Lucas and my Dad's got a Ferrari in his garage and you see the Nolans? I done with all of them and the Spice Girls too, honest! True story, their bus bus broke down outside my house and I was the only who could fix it and they had no money on 'em so they had to pay me some way, true story!

12PB

"Plus 12 PB is only 705 times more than I have on my home servers "

Indeed, if they are building a data centre you can probably safely assume we're talking tens of thousands of servers (i didn't look to see if they have given a number), so this could just be buying a pair of 500GB hard drives (why bother buying smaller these days?) to run RAID-1 for 12,000 servers

And how exactly is this news?!

I recently bought 72 TB for £10K. With bulk purchasing, call it 100 TB for £10K, so 1PB for £100K, so Apple just spent around a million for disks. So who cares? Are you going to report every tech company who spends a mil on hardware? gheez. Tell us when you've heard what they are going to do with it. And I mean when you've heard something *new*.

REally?

Scale is the thing.

> 72TB of storage in an enterprise managed cluster for $10k?

...well this kind of deflates the idea that you can having your own local storage or that you won't get raped on cloud storage. I can have a 7TB array for a little more than the cost of the disks and it will fit inside one of my PCs. Do this twice and I've probably got more/better redundancy than some "enterprise" solution.

When you are trying to be everyone's Time Machine the problem gets big in a hurry and becomes something quite apart from what you are trying to replicate and replace.

The thought of moving terabytes in and out of the cloud is just... painful.

Really

Not $10K, but £10K, and my discount factor for bulk purchasing was not 10x, but 100/72 = 1.38x, which I think is not unreasonable. The machine is a 4U box from Supermicro. They used to make the innards of the Sun Thumper, which was the best deal in town for years, until Oracle killed it by hiking the price 5-fold.

Trouble for....

"...to support its iTunes video service, according to report citing an "inside source"."

So, does this mean that the Netflix App is the next one to get face-punched?

"allowing tune junkies to store their music collections on Apple's service and access them from any device"

Wouldn't it be a LOT easier just to keep a database of the music they've "purchased" and present that to them as "virtual" files. The rest of the stuff that might be uploaded (assuming they allow non-DRM content to be uploaded....) could be de-dupped in the cloud based on song/video metadata, or the time-tested block-level method...

RE: Trouble for....

I think you've spotted the real plan - remove customer control of their data by forcing them in the next gen of Apple devices to keep the media/data on the Apple cloud. Then Apple has complete control over what you get to play/download/install as you have to stream it, and anything they don't like will be deleted from your library regardless of where or how legally you got it. This is standard Jobs micro-control, and they'll dress it up as offering their customers the ability to have all their media on all their different (Apple) devices, and the Apple fanbois will let themselves be tied in knots and still scream about how great it is.

@ Matt Bryant

You think Apple wants total control over what its customers can or can't do to its stuff? I just tried upgrading a newish Dell desktop for a friend. I had to get written permission from Michael Dell just so I could remove a side panel.

@Matt Bryant...

RE: @ Matt Bryant

"....I just tried upgrading a newish Dell desktop for a friend...." I'm guessing he was desperate then?

"....I had to get written permission from Michael Dell just so I could remove a side panel...." I'm also guessing "newish" means still under warranty, which means you were lucky to get permission to do anything to it. All vendors have warranties, and they'll all tell you that if you're not one of their service partners then upgrades will invalidate the warranty. Get over the Dell hatred.

RE: @Matt Bryant...

"So Sun are dead...." Finally! A Sunshiner that has got the picture at last!

"....you are now turning your attention to Apple..." You were obviously too busy squealling about my Sunset posts to read the Apple ones where I regularly point out the self-delusion of the average fanboi. Good to see a Sunshiner branching out into new areas and not just crying into his beer, but you really need to keep up.

My future hard disk

In 1988, I got my first hard disk (5.25 inch 20 MBs) for CDN$425. In 2010, 12 years later, I got my first 2 TB hard disk (3.5 inch) for CDN$150, i.e. a 100,000-fold increase in capacity at one third the price. If the trends continue, I will have a 1.8 inch 200 petabyte hard disk for $35 twelve years from now.

"... I'll have a 1.8 inch 200 PB hard disk for $35 twelve years from now."

That would be really cool...

Unfortunately, once the size of an individual magnetic domain:

-- -- Magnetic domain on Wikipedia:

-- -- -- -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_domain

on the platter is shrunk to a certain point, the polarity/magnetic alignment of that domain can spontaneously change due to ambient kinetic (vibration, etc.) and thermal (heat/temperature change) effects.

Patterned media:

-- -- Patterned media on Wikipedia:

-- -- -- -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_media

will help keep the increasing storage density trend going for the near future, but eventually we're gonna have to move to a Spintronics-based technology:

Capacity

Isilon

For those of you who don't know Isilon:

They probably bought NL-Series (which are blue, by the way). Each node contains up to 72TB. Divide 12PB by 72TB, that's about 167 nodes. At 3U each, I'd estimate that this would take approx. 20 racks full allowing for some space left over in the racks. My semi-educated ballpark estimate is around $10million.

Two nice things about Isilon is that it uses an Infiniband backbone (48Gb/s) to shuffle data around behind the scenes, and that it puts all these nodes into one GIANT file system (as opposed to other schemes where you have tons of mount points to deal with). Each node has dual-gig ports for mounting the entire cluster. Do the math on this and you have 333Gb/s potential throughput. This is definitely a good thing if they are thinking about cloud-streaming all that music.

hmmmm

Not really that much

According to my extrememly rough calculations, that doesn't sound like that much really.

I have a music collection on my HD of about 50GB (not including Video). They could store approx 250,000 music collections the size of mine which, considering the user-base of Apple products, doesn't seem like enough.

Well, that's 1200TB if I understood correctly...

...which is not much, considering most post-houses are well over petabytes in local storage already.

Well, Steve "Freedom From Porn" Jobs, it's pretty depressing, you really need to come up with something more interesting, even if it's a copycat of someone else as you like to do it, Mr Puritan-in-Chief.

you didn't understand correctly.

in the same way that 1TB = 1024 GB

1PB = 1024TB

1,200TB is roughly 1.2PB not 12.

the number that you're looking for is 12,000TB. ~ 12PB

>>Not really that much #

>>I have a music collection on my HD of about 50GB (not including Video). They could store approx 250,000 music collections the size of mine which, considering the user-base of Apple products, doesn't seem like enough.

you've not considered de-duping.

How many of those 250,000 will have at least 1 of the same track? each track only needs to get stored once, how many people own a copy of some particularly well selling album,

Along those lines...

Along similar lines, if this is going to be for the exclusive storage of original iTunes Store bought tracks, why bother even "storing" the customer's music at all - just store the entire iTunes Store library, and have pointers from your user's libraries, to each track they own.